Abstract

In his account of adjudication, Ronald Dworkin makes the case that judicial engagement with morality is a necessary feature of legal practice and so of law itself. This paper examines the nature and implications of this claim. It argues that Dworkin is concerned with a form of engagement between law and morality that is insufficient to make morality count as part of law in virtue of it and that the sort of engagement with morality that Dworkin identifies turns out to support only the notion that judicial acts have moral meaning or import of some sort. Dworkin’s key interpretive claim that adjudication entails offering a positive moral justification for the practice of law is undermined by the type of moral engagement he properly identifies